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Friday, February 27, 2009

I am, as always, thankful to Mr. Shailesh Nitin Trivedi- or as he now refers to himself "Mr. Shoogle" (to contrast himself from Google Translator)- for helping me with the translation. The English version of this post can be read here.

Friday, February 20, 2009

In this post, I review the four other films nominated for Best Picture at the 81st Academy Awards (due to be held day after tomorrow, on February 22nd): FROST/NIXON, THE READER, MILK and THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. I've also included DOUBT because even though it hasn’t been nominated for Best Picture, all four of its principal performers are up for acting awards. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE has already been commented upon elsewhere. You can also read my film reviews at FLIXSTER and the IMDB websites.

1. FROST/NIXON: THE EYES SPEAKYou don't have to look like Nixon to portray him. That point was already proven by Sir Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's film of the same name. But while Mr. Stone's film was a biopic, this one focuses on only one- and also, what was to become the last- public chapter in the disgraced president's life.

In that sense, Frank Langella's role is far more difficult: he had to convey the entire meaning of a man's life by mostly sitting at an interview, and using nothing more than words and- this, I believe, is the key to understanding his performance- expressions; in particular, the way he uses his eyes. No, he doesn't cry or stare; he doesn't even look away; what he does is that he doesn't look at you. And that's telling a lot about the man he portrays. In the famous interviews, Mr. Langella's verbal evasiveness just doesn't sync with what his eyes are screaming aloud. David Frost, it would seem, already had his confession long before President Nixon uttered those famous lines; long before the interviews started, even.I guess Frost's real brilliance lay in realizing this before anyone else- and then, risking everything he had to get the interviews. In making this aspect clear, Ron Howard's film makes a contribution no history book or archival footage possibly can. Nixon's confession wasn't redemptive for the American nation only; more importantly, it was an act of self-redemption for the man who made it.

Langella/Nixon doesn't admit this, but we can read it very clearly in his eyes.

2. THE READER: MS. WINSLET’S SECRETThe Reader belongs to Kate Winslet: she is quite simply superb. Everybody else, Ralph Fiennes included, slip into oblivion. The sex scenes are- how does one put it?- both erotic and disturbing. When the Kid (played by David Kross) asks her if she- a much older woman- loves him, she nods. But the nod is everything. It means no and yes and also 'are you kidding me?', all at once.

Her past is demonic, no doubt, but I suspect that the viewer will (like me) come out of the movie sympathizing with her. After seeing the film, the question that perplexed me was why did she kill herself? The most obvious answer is Guilt. Yet, I can't help feeling that it might be something else also. Why for instance didn't this Guilt consume her before? And whether this Guilt also included her abandoning- not loving- the Kid, which, as we discover, leaves him permanently petrified- passive and polite? But she couldn't have known all that, could she? Perhaps- and this is the only answer I could come up with- she was ashamed of not being able to read, so ashamed in fact that she chose to spend the rest of her life in prison than let people know this. Like Salman Rushdie wrote in 'Shame', if you tell the secret, it invites shame; if you don't, you are stuck with guilt. Kate's character chooses guilt.

That she couldn't read was the only secret she wished to keep as her own, having no qualms about admitting to her other more horrific misdeeds: it was indeed the defining characteristic of who she was, the one thing that made her, and what eventually becomes our key to understanding her. Ironically enough, once that secret is gone- she does eventually teach herself to read and write with the help of audio-tapes of books Ralph Fiennes' character sends her- she no longer knows her place in the world...

But we can never know the answer for certain, and that is what makes The Reader such a great, beautifully multi-layered- and might I add, secretive?- film.

3. MILK: PROPAGANDA-PICTUREThe thing with biopics is that they tend to focus too much on their subjects even to the point of obsession, and in the process, they often ignore the fact that there are always at least two sides to every story. Milk is no different- and perhaps, it should not be. But when you go to see a Gus Van Sant film, difference is what you have come to expect (remember his mesmerizing opus on Columbine, Elephant): there is an unmistakable hypnotic quality about them. Milk is anything but hypnotic; at times, it becomes outright jarring.

And of course, it relies too much on the performance of Sean Penn: that is its principal strength but also, in my opinion, its main weakness. There is no doubt that Mr. Penn is a superb actor, the kind who quietly slips into his character's skin. In Milk, he doesn't seek to re-interpret- or worse, re-invent- his real-life subject; instead he blends himself seamlessly into his character. So yes: you can still discern traces of Mr. Penn's temperamental volatility in the determined if somewhat power-driven gay-rights crusader, Mr. Milk. This makes the film so much more interesting- as also the simmering tension between his character and Josh Brolin's, which lies at the heart of Milk.

And yet Milk is really about Milk, the politician, and tells us very little about his personal life. For instance, his lover (played by James Franco) is at best, two-dimensional. When he leaves him, we don't really know why. The script simply doesn't allow this aspect of Mr. Milk to develop.

More to the point: by focusing almost exclusively on his several failed election campaigns, what Mr. Van Sant offers us is not so much a movie as a propaganda film.

4. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON: ONE GUMP TOO MANYI love epics. Movies should be made like that: sweeping tales that light up the big screen. But they're not, at least not the ones that the Academy seems to like these days. The Reader, Milk and Frost/Nixon- all of which have been nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars- are more HBO-style made-for-TV movies than Epics (which is not to say that they aren't well-made). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is unabashedly epic, and had it not been for Slumdog Millionaire, it would have, despite its shortcomings, been my favorite film of the year.

If Looks could kill?I've always suspected that the really great looking actors & actresses suffer from an acting-handicap: their perfect good looks lead us to think of them in terms of gods & goddesses, and therefore any effort by them to play human beings is seen as flawed. This works well for those who can't act at all- like Bollywood’s own Salman Khan- as it compensates amply for their lack of talent; but for those who can act- and I mean, really act- it's nothing short of a curse. Sadly, Brad Pitt falls in the latter category. He is perhaps the most underrated actor of our time- principally because of his extraordinary good looks. No wonder he opted to act in a film in which the first-shot of him is as a horribly deformed baby that even his father doesn't want. And then of course, he begins to grow younger and also, more and more like the actual Brad Bitt...

The trick, I guess, was for Mr. Pitt to look the various ages he portrays in- and as- Benjamin Button. The wizardry of special effects can only do so much; the rest was up to him, really. (Remember Dustin Hoffman in the 1970 film, Little Big Man- back when they didn’t have this kind of technology.) He has terrific company in the form of three extremely gifted actresses: his mother (Taraji Henson), the love of his life (Cate Blanchett), and his fling (Tilda Swinton). Julia Ormond plays his daughter, but she hardly ever leaves the room. In any event, we remember them all having done such kinds of roles before- but not so for Mr. Pitt. (Not that he hasn't but we just don't remember it.)

The entire premise of the film, taken from a 1920s short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, seems to me to be needlessly weird; despite going through great pains to make it look believable, it simply isn't. After all, wouldn't a man who defies the most fundamental law of nature- that we must all grow old and die- attract our news-obsessed society's attention? Mr. Button, however, does not, leading a relatively uneventful unnoticed existence. Also, the whole business of a 90 year old man falling in love with a 9 year old girl edges a bit too close to bigotry for my taste.

But the single greatest flaw with this film is that we've already seen it before. Not one with the same title of course, but the way the tale is told. In case you are wondering, let me give you a clue. Two words: Eric Roth. He was the guy who wrote the screenplay for Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump. The only real difference between the two films is that while Mr. Gump grows older; Mr. Button becomes younger. Everything else- every single scene, every single character they come into contact with, every single shot, even the plot- are almost identical.

The Academy has already honored Forrest Gump once before; there is, in my opinion, no point in doing so again.

5.DOUBT: ALL THE FILM’S A STAGEGreat theatre doesn't necessarily make for great cinema. Doubt proves this. (The Lion In Winter, however, doesn’t.) Despite brilliant all-round performances by a sterling cast- for instance, every time Meryl Streep looked into the camera and I mean really looked, that icy stare, something inside me froze, the temperature dropped- there were a couple of times when I found myself thinking 'when will all this end'.

After all, the story doesn't really move, and all the action, so to speak, is intellectual. The expected duel between Hoffman and Streep never really materialized- with the former quietly slipping away. The central question of the film- can love be a sufficient justification for lust?- remains strangely unanswered. The film does little to influence the viewers' views; it ends up merely reinforcing them. (For me, the answer is No, and Doubt hasn't created any doubts in my mind about that.)

The moment of catharsis, when it does finally come, arrives in the form of a dialogue that Ms. Streep's character has with Viola Davis, who plays the mother of the black boy she believes Hoffman's character has 'made advances at.' It's a short scene, but boy does it surprise! Both actresses hold no punches back: morality, it seems, has no place for a mother who only wants her child to get away from the world she has brought him into. There can be no certainty about things like that. Material is prized over the moral, giving way to a new unorthodox kind of morality. Wasn't that incidentally also the theme of Vatican-II being held at the same time as the events this film depicts?

In the end, Doubt is all that remains.

6. Slumdog Millionaire: And the Oscar Goes to...For millions like me raised on a staple-diet of commercial Hindi cinema, there’s nothing particularly novel about its plot: the relatively lukewarm response it has gotten from Indian filmgoers compared to the rapturous applause elsewhere is proof of this. Its rags-to-riches tale could well be a cinematic-metaphor for India’s own rise during the period in which Jamal, Salim and Latika's lives unfold. In so many ways, it is the story of India as well as those who have lived here through the tumultuous past two decades.

Its phenomenal ‘rules-breaking success’- to paraphrase the longtime film-critic, Roger Ebert- therefore owes equally if not more to the disenchanted times the world suddenly finds itself thrust into as it does to the movie’s delightful intrinsic-charm: after all, what better medicine than a good healthy dose of unbridled Hope wrapped in wondrously uplifting Jai-hos to cure the globe of its seemingly insurmountable Recession-blues? All the other films nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars reflect the Gloom around- but also, within- us; none with the solitary exception of this film offers a way-out: even- or, especially- if the way-out is an implausibly exhilaratingly happy ending. And that is precisely what makes it work.

I leave you with this particular mise-en-scène: as Jamal weaves his way through Mumbai’s reptilian traffic to answer that one last remaining two million-rupee question, a wrinkly old beggar knocks at his car-window. Thinking she has come to ask for money he ignores her at first only to be confronted with the realization that she doesn’t want his money at all; on the contrary, she wants him to win it all. “Béta,” she beams to Jamal as he is driven away, “jeet ke aana.” [Son, win & come.] His victory, after all, would be hers as well.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Note: You can also comment on this post at the IMDB website. Registration to IMDB is free.

For millions like me raised on a staple-diet of commercial Hindi cinema, there’s nothing particularly novel about its plot: the relatively lukewarm response it has gotten from Indian filmgoers compared to the rapturous applause elsewhere is proof of this. Its rags-to-riches tale could well be a cinematic-metaphor for India’s own rise during the period in which Jamal, Salim and Latika's lives unfold. In so many ways, it is the story of India as well as those who have lived here through the tumultuous past two decades.

Its phenomenal ‘rules-breaking success’- to paraphrase the longtime film-critic, Roger Ebert- therefore owes equally if not more to the disenchanted times the world suddenly finds itself thrust into as it does to the movie’s delightful intrinsic-charm: after all, what better medicine than a good healthy dose of unbridled Hope wrapped in wondrously uplifting Jai-hos to cure the globe of its seemingly insurmountable Recession-blues? All the other films nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars reflect the Gloom around- but also, within- us; none with the solitary exception of this film offers a way-out: even- or, especially- if the way-out is an implausibly exhilaratingly happy ending. And that is precisely what makes it work.

I leave you with this particular mise-en-scène: as Jamal weaves his way through Mumbai’s reptilian traffic to answer that one last remaining two million-rupee question, a wrinkly old beggar knocks at his car-window. Thinking she has come to ask for money he ignores her at first only to be confronted with the realization that she doesn’t want his money at all; on the contrary, she wants him to win it all. “Béta,” she beams to Jamal as he is driven away, “jeet ke aana.” [Son, win & come.] His victory, after all, would be hers as well. Much as Slumdog Millionaire’s victory on Oscar Night would be India’s- and also of Underdogs everywhere.Read More (आगे और पढ़ें)......

Friday, February 13, 2009

इसका हिंदी अनुवाद यहाँ पढ़ें. The Quiet Passage of An EraI’ve often wondered if Lakhiram Agrawal, the Doyen of Chhattisgarh’s ruling party, died contended? When I last called on him at his Kharsia residence almost two years ago (2007), he wasn’t exactly happy. Part of this unhappiness, I presume, had to do with his son, Amar Agrawal’s recent ouster from the state Cabinet (I had the distinct feeling that he had not been consulted in the matter); but for the most part, it had to do with the way things had turned out not just with his party in Chhattisgarh- ‘the Congressification of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)’, after all, is a common lament to be found in contemporary RSS-polemic, most famously in LK Advani’s autobiography and with increasing regularity, in the editorials of its monthly mouthpiece, The Organizer- but also with the State of Politics in India.

We weren’t alone in that meeting. On a previous occasion that I had met him in 2003, the Press had a field day speculating on what was discussed. This had caused great embarrassment to both of us, especially since political machinations were the last thing on the agenda in what was an extremely informal tête-à-tête. This time, therefore, I invited the Press to be present at the meeting. During the course of our rather candid conversation, he created quite a stir by using the soubriquet ‘Aurangzeb’ (conveniently ignoring the numerous Hindu instances of patricide) to describe some of the leaders of the present state administration. (Funnily enough, nobody wrote a word about this, bolstering my belief that realpolitik, if conducted openly and frankly rather than surreptitiously and duplicitously, isn’t such a bad thing.) At the time- I believe it was just after the Congress’ victory in the Kota bye-election- he wasn’t very confident of the Government coming back to power. For this he blamed, more than anything else, the lack of respect today’s youth have for the old. It wasn’t very difficult to read the meaning of what he said.

The Question that begs to be asked then is this: did his party- the one he almost single-handedly built from scratch against all conceivable odds and facing the full brunt of the then formidable Congress machinery, often traveling on a rickety jeep loaned to him by the Rajmata of Gwalior to remote corners of (the then undivided) Madhya Pradesh along with his longtime companion, Kushabhau Thakre in the hope of winning fresh recruits to forge the Jan Sangh-BJP’s superstructure, so to speak- abandon him in the end?

He seemed to think so: but the abandonment was only partly personal; it was ideological. Like most of his right-wing compatriots, he had begun his long, often arduous, journey hoping to create an alternative to what they believed to be the dynastic-sycophantic and ultimately redundant culture of the Congress. In this, they- he- succeeded superbly; but it was a pyrrhic victory. The alternative that has come into being- that governs today’s Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh- is at best, another, more grotesque, version of that same culture it sought so desperately to replace.Three Illustrations on the Nature of PowerIn this context, Prof. Tan Chung’s perceptive assessment of Chairman Mao’s Revolution comes to mind: analyzing the composition of pre- and post-revolutionary Chinese polities, he found that those running the country as newly-consecrated members of the Politburo were almost exactly the same set of people from the same families that supplied Mandarins to the deposed Manchu Emperors.

Closer home, I recall a friend of my father’s showing me a set of pictures depicting the welcome of various chief ministers to Raipur. At first glance, there appeared to be nothing particularly remarkable about those grainy-yellowing photographs. On closer inspection, I discovered that only the chief minister’s face had changed; everybody around him was exactly the same, offering almost exactly the same poses of energetic supplication. In the photographs, taken over the course of almost two decades, it appeared that this historic party of perpetual welcomers had stoically, even magically, refused to age.

In defense of this ever-youthful breed, I offer the following story narrated to me by the son of a former chief minister of Haryana: on his first morning walk upon assuming office, his father was joined by a certain man who seemed to know what he wanted even before he knew it himself; naturally, over the course of his tenure, this newfound companionship grew into a deep friendship; they became, to use his own word, inseparable. Then, when he fell out of office, there was not one word from this man. Years passed, and he eventually made it back to power. Once again, on his morning walk, he discovered this man suddenly bestride him. Distraught but also bemused, he said to him, “I thought we were very good friends. Where did you go for these many years?” “Go?” the man innocently asked.

“I didn’t go anywhere, Huzoor. It was you who went.”

The Uneasy PatriarchThe above three illustrations illuminate the true nature of power; more precisely, its God-like capacity to cast those in it in its own image. Alas, the BJP, when it did finally come into power, could not escape the bewitching allure of its entrapments. For instance, in many ways, the late Pramod Mahajan became more ‘Congressi’ than any Congressman alive: while the latter consider Power as an Art, Mr. Mahajan developed it into a sophisticated Science, and in the process, transformed forever the way politics is conducted in the country. (The BJP incidentally owes a lot to this transformation for its comeback in Chhattisgarh.)

Mr. Agrawal saw it only too well: in more tangible terms, this implied the sidelining of the Old Guard- and also, the Old Methods & Ideas of RSS Sarsanghachalaks, Keshava Hedgewar and Madhav Golwalkar- by those sworn-in as ministers in recently formed BJP-led governments all over India (or what contemporary political commentators term as the rift between the Sangh & the BJP). His son, he could scarcely forget, was also a minister.

This last aspect, in particular, troubled him: he told me once that whenever his son’s name was discussed as a prospective candidate at party meetings, he quietly left the room so as not to influence the decision in any way. If his son was to be given his party’s ticket, it had to be solely on the basis of merit; not ties of blood. Clearly, he didn’t want to be accused of being a closeted-dynast. After all, his life’s work had meant so much more than the mere aggrandizement of his progeny. It was as if he wanted to proclaim: “Let no one say, I did it all for my sons.”

Non-DynastHis apprehensions in this case were, in my opinion, totally unfounded. In fact, only one of his sons entered politics, winning a string of elections from a constituency where his father had very little influence and which was until then considered a Congress bastion. The others continue with his family’s tobacco business. If at all his ‘family’ benefited from his life’s work, it was in the largest sense of the word: the sense in which the RSS ideologues have defined it as the “Sangh Parivar”: “the Sangh,” pontificated Mr. Golwalkar in his seminal work We Or Our Nationhood Defined, “is not an organization within society.” “It is the organization of society itself.”

Mr. Lakhiram Agrawal ought to have, by right, remained the undisputed Patriarch of this all-encompassing Parivar in Chhattisgarh. After all, had it not been for those endless journeys to the back of beyond- Jashpur, for instance, where he relentlessly kept egging a young prince, Dilip Singh Judeo to ‘convert’ from Congress; or to Kawardha, where he impressed upon an equally youthful Ayurvedic physician, Raman Singh, to attend RSS shakhas- there simply wouldn’t be a BJP in government, ever. But for some reason, his protégées kept turning against their mentor.

I witnessed this first-hand when twelve BJP legislators defected to the Congress in late 2001 in what was to be the first- and also, the last- such incident in Indian History. The dominant reason they gave for their defection, shockingly enough, comprised of two words: Lakhiram Agrawal. Quite a few of them complained that despite being party MLAs, he didn’t even care to look down upon them when they touched his feet; this, they said, hurt them no end. When I later told this to Lakhi Uncle (as I called him), he simply laughed. “If that is so,” he said, “then they shouldn’t have bothered to touch my feet.”

Now that I think of it, I believe that what people saw as aloof Arrogance was in fact the Self-respect of a self-made man. In his world, he was clearly under no obligation to reciprocate, or even acknowledge, the obeisance- perhaps he thought of it as nothing more than a phony display of respect; a ruse for obtaining further favors- of those he had, quite literally, called into political existence from out of nowhere. That they- his creatures, really- should expect him to do so was, in his estimation, laughable.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to his point of view. More than anything else, it simply doesn’t make for good politics. As someone who belongs to a family with a fairly long record of doling-out- and in turn, getting- favors, I know only too well that one shouldn’t take them for granted: people, after all, don’t remember the favor; they merely think of it as their God-given right, something they themselves have earned on their own. In not accepting this contemporary value, Mr. Agrawal displayed a naivety not uncommon with men of his generation; and in the process, soured relations with several of his protégées, many of whom are in powerful positions today both within the government and the organization.

A Personal PoliticianAs for the rest- those of us who weren’t made by, or obligated to, him, for instance- he was courteous to the core, even embarrassingly so. Every time I met him, he always, always addressed me with the honorific “Amit ji” even though he was my father’s longtime colleague in the Rajya Sabha (Council of States); my senior by almost half a century; and my better in every way.

He was also, I believe, a fair critic: he once told me that he thought my father was, in all probability, a better administrator than Arjun Singh, the legendary chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and my father’s earliest mentor; but he also told me that what prevented Papa from becoming really great was his obstinacy to consult others, even those in his Cabinet. Now, I am in no position to say how far this assessment is true of my father’s style of functioning- although the current public opinion, in part fuelled by Mr. Agrawal’s phenomenal propaganda machine, does tend to support this inference- but there is absolutely no denying the sagacity of his advice. After all, the act of consultation is itself significant; it doesn’t matter if it gives rise to consent or not.

In any event, I can’t imagine any other BJP leader of the state making this kind of observation about a political rival, even going to the extent of offering constructive advice to his son to enable a comeback. This is perhaps because Mr. Agrawal didn’t see my father simply as an opponent- a bête noire- to be taken out and destroyed. On the contrary, I imagine he thought of him as a colleague and a friend. Having struggled for the most part of his life, he was not wedded to the machinations of power, which perforce breed the most absurd insecurities in those who wish for nothing more than to cling on to it at any cost.

His world was, therefore, comprised not of do-or-die sort of crafty power plays but of people who even if they didn’t share your point of view, were at any rate, worthy of acquaintanceship. To him, the political never became personal. (To a lesser degree, I see this quality in his son.) Even more, he prized the personal over the political. At his daughter-in-law's funeral last year, he confided to me that after his friend, Kushabhau Thakre’s demise, he didn’t really have the heart to go to Delhi, party meetings or no party meetings: the Ashok Road office, where his party is headquartered at Delhi, reminded him of his late friend especially since the latter- a bachelor wholly committed to his organization- used to live there in a single room, presumably having nowhere else to go.

A man’s life, it is said, can be judged by the people who attend his funeral. Mr. Agrawal held no formal position of power; except as an organizer without compare, he excelled in no particular field; he was neither an academic nor was he an artist. Yet, people from all walks of life- both from within his party and outside as well as those who have nothing to do with politics at all- came from near and far to pay their homage to him; these are people whose lives he had touched and comforted. They came principally because they knew and loved him, personally.

Ideological- or even political- affinity is not a requisite of enduring personal relationships: political enemies can also be personal friends. This is perhaps the most valuable lesson Mr. Agrawal has to offer to politicians of our generation. It is also his most enduring legacy to Chhattisgarh.Read More (आगे और पढ़ें)......

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

He Came From NowhereBarack Obama isn’t so much Black or even half-Black as he is a Mirror, on which a nation, once great but now in the throes of an unprecedented identity crisis, sees the reflection of its diverse, divergent desires. Until two years ago, he was a global non-entity; a name often confused with its (then) more familiar if somewhat notorious homonym, Osama (after the Al Qaeda leader, Mr. Bin Laden).

Yet it is precisely this fact- of his discreet, even dignified, obscurity- which paradoxically enough accounts for Mr. Obama’s meteoric metamorphosis as the world’s most recognizable, talked-about Face: ever an artful politician, he pulled off electoral history’s greatest coup by turning what appeared to be his most debilitating weakness into his greatest strength: capitalizing on his Obscurity, he suddenly became all things to all people.

His infinitely more famous rivals- Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain, to name two more unfortunate ones- simply didn’t have that sort of advantage. Having been in public life for decades- in Mr. McCain’s case, for almost as long as Mr. Obama’s earthly life- their every action and every utterance had been dissected, discussed, debated, deified and demonized to death; more to the point, most people had already formed their variegated Opinions of them and those that didn’t probably couldn’t care less. Mr. Obama- and his excellent campaign team- had the astuteness to make the most of this. He began by making those who didn’t- couldn’t- care, care.

Like Karl Rowe (George W. Bush’s wizard of a mentor), who based his protégé’s victories by tapping into America’s hitherto untapped and instinctually conservative exurbias, Mr. Obama’s team reached out to an entirely new demographic: the hitherto politically nonchalant but temperamentally liberal Generation Y; the sort of chaps who hang out at Starbuck’s and inhabit fast-mushrooming social networking websites like Facebook; the kind that are desperately looking for a Purpose, any purpose. Mr. Obama gave them a Purpose: he- Mr. Obama- was it.

And The Money Kept Rollin’ InMrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain meanwhile were busily wooing the Establishment with its tempting $2500-a-plate fund-raisers. In retrospect, that wasn’t very clever: America, after all, is a land that thrives on Las Vegas, and Vegas is a place that thrives on slot-machines, which account for more than 70% of its takings, and not on high-rollers (who in any case prefer to head for Monte Carlo and now increasingly to Macau). That, I guess, is the Cardinal Rule of how the world works: Ignore the little people who persistently, patiently put coins into insatiable slots, and you’ve no business left; get the slot-machines ringing, and the high-rollers follow. In the Gamble that is Politics, Mr. Obama went straight to the slot-machines, and- there’s no better way to put this- he hit the jackpot, big-time.

Every time he needed money- and rest assured, he needed loads of it to establish a campaign machine to rival that of the formidable Clintonistas as well as the GOP’s (Grand Old Party is how the Republican Party is more commonly known)- he simply went to the tens of millions of mostly youthful members logged on to his webpage on Facebook, and lo and behold, the money kept rolling in: by donating a few dollars each, they suddenly found involvement, purpose and hope; and the trickle of online dollars almost magically transformed itself into a flood of several millions. But that wasn’t all: Mr. Obama also ensured that their participation didn’t end with the dollar; like some post-modern Messiah, he urged his minions to go out, commune at homely gatherings, and spread the Word deploying the very latest media modern technology has to offer.

John 1:1And that brings me to the single most important aspect of Mr. Obama’s campaign: before everything else- even before the untapped demographic and the money- there was the Word, which set everything in motion. Actually, there were Two Words. Change and Hope, Hope and Change. At first, they sound awfully clichéd. We’ve heard politicians of all persuasions utter them countless times before; their etymology is primordial, buried deep into our species’ collective unconscious as a palliative to fear and fossilization. Yet, when Mr. Obama uttered them- and this wasn’t a very uncommon occurrence, to say the least- it struck a cord in those mysterious places that set butterflies magically aflutter in our bellies.

Poetry aside, it is important, I think, to understand just why that happened. Here, we must perforce employ the tools bequeathed to us by Jacques Derrida and examine three things: what was said and why (content and context); who said it (author); and what was meant and how the meaning thereof was perceived by those who heard it (or to use Quentin Skinner’s terminology, the ‘intended illocutionary force’).

Osama begat ObamaTo first understand the significance of the content, we must necessarily look to the context. This was provided most obviously by the Bush Years, marked as they were by a spiraling descent into war, penury and global ridicule. This was an era (hopefully now ending) permeated by what I’ve elsewhere called Osama-phobia after the chief cause- the sine qua non- of President Bush’s abject but involuntary reversal from his first campaign’s big-on-morals-and-small-on-government stance. Fear, or more precisely, the fear of Fear, fed into- and authored- every decision he took. (His Vice President, the much more hated and aloof Dick Cheney, didn’t do anything to assuage these fears.) The two parameters of American Supremacy alluded to by Henry Kissinger in his monumental treatise on Diplomacy- military might and economic prowess- were both put to severe test by the quagmire of the double-invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq, and a widening and ultimately insurmountable Deficit- the typically American habit of spending more than they earn- that has brought about a global recession.

In the memorable words of the Eagle’s song, Iraq, in effect, became Mr. Bush’s Hotel California: You can checkout any time you like, But you can never leave! Despite his rather premature “Mission Accomplished” glee, the war in Iraq procrastinated indefinitely. From the start, the Invasion of Iraq was doomed: his justification for the invasion- that Saddam Hussein, the then Tirkiti despot of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which he hoped perhaps to use against America in league with Al Qaeda- turned out to be, to put it mildly, untrue; his method of conducting that invasion- against the express wishes of the international community- ended up alienating even America’s closest friends (with the notable exception of Britain’s Tony Blair, who inturn ended up losing his own chair); and his hope that the invasion would somehow usher in an era of democracy in the Middle East wasn’t quite realized to the extent that he had expected.

In the Case of Jefferson v HamiltonBut despite all this, Mr. Bush’s worst enemy wasn’t Osama bin Laden, the Taliban or even Saddam Hussein: it was the American People themselves. No wartime American President with the possible exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has for long enjoyed his fellow-citizens’- and the Congress’- unflinching support: despite their rather militaristic national anthem, Americans have never been comfortable with the sight of body-bags of slain soldiers wrapped in star-spangled banners arriving home. At heart, they remain Jeffersonians (after Thomas Jefferson), content to be an island (albeit a rather large one!) blissfully unaware of what’s happening beyond their shores and hoping that they wouldn’t need a government to govern them at all. Let us not forget that when Mr. Bush first emerged on the scene, he too was something of a Jeffersonian in the ideals he so passionately espoused.

But he too, like most Americans, was confronted with a distinctly Hamiltonian reality (after Alexander Hamilton): the almost instinctual need of the American Establishment- Noam Chomsky’s military-industrial complex- to look for new enemies when old ones are gone, as epitomized in the ironically self-fulfilling prophecy of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the New World Order. In this sense atleast, Huntington gave a fresh, new lease of life to Hamilton. And what a lease that was! President Bush, the quintessential Jeffersonian, became a die-hard disciple of Hamilton in what was to be his life’s second epiphany (the first one took him from Booze to the Bible). Of course, it would be wrong to put all the blame on the Establishmentarian Inertia of Washington: Mr. Bin Laden, in all fairness, deserves much of the credit for Mr. Bush’s conversion.

His attack on the Twin Towers (9/11) only amplified Mr. Bush’s innate sense of Christian morality: his world was suddenly divided into black & white, good & the axis of evil, and under the circumstances, Crusade was the logical outcome of Jihad. Morality breeds decisiveness; lack of it makes one indecisive. This is America’s lesson gleaned from its last two Presidents, Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton. I’ve often wondered what Mr. Clinton would’ve done had he been President on 9/11. Sure, he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, WMDs or no WMDs (remember his dilly-dallying on Kosovo, Congo and the rest); he would certainly have ruled out going it alone, without the backing of the world community (God knows, Mr. Hussein counted on that!); he might not even have considered an outright invasion of Afghanistan, toying first with Diplomacy or being content with the destruction of Mr. Bin Laden’s person. But the question that begs to be answered is this: would Al Qaeda be as thoroughly destroyed as it is now; and would 9/11 have been the last terrorist attack on American soil?

As far as the Bush Legacy is concerned, I believe in two things: one, that it was Mr. Bush’s pandering to his Jeffersonian instincts that ultimately led to his failure in Iraq. He wanted to invade Iraq, destroy Saddam and get out as quickly as possible with a minimum of force and cost; the idea that nations don’t just build themselves after being invaded and destroyed didn’t quite cross his Jeffersonian mind (apparently he forgot all about post-second world war Western Europe and Japan, both of which required prolonged infusions of American money, manpower and foresight to rebuild themselves). The success of the Surge in Iraq- today’s provincial elections have brought true democracy to the Middle East for the first time in history, and Mr. Bush should be given due credit for it- shows that the middle-of-the-road approach is at fault. Had Mr. Bush not been bullied by public opinion and his own mindset to limit the costs to America in the first instance, his country wouldn’t have ended up spending so much- in terms of blood, sweat, toil and money- in Iraq, and thousands of innocent lives might’ve been saved. In short, if he is to be blamed, it should be for doing too little; not too much. Secondly, I also believe that it is too early to pronounce judgment on the Bush Legacy: History will have to wait for things to settle down in Iraq before arriving at any sort of decision; hopefully, it will look more kindly upon the Bush Years than our own generation. (To see what I mean, take a look at HBO's award-winning mini-series on John Adams, America's mostly-forgotten and much-misunderstood second President.)

No Specifics Please, We're AmericanBut I’m getting ahead of myself: it is precisely from the as-yet-unsettled dust of the Bush Years that an obscure entity like Mr. Obama has emerged to take on the world; the Present, and not History, is responsible for that. Hope and Change- the Two Words- stand for everything the Bush Years did not; they are, in a way, the anti-thesis of everything those Years have come symbolize today. They’re also, interestingly enough, the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD)- that indescribable abstract- which binds together today’s America. Looking back at the rhetoric of his campaign- both before and after the Primaries- it appears that Mr. Obama said very little indeed: he said that things were bad and that change was needed (without elaborating on the how of it); he said that America needed to get out of Iraq soon (again, without letting us in on the how and when); he said that he was for the New (but not against the Old); he said that the poor deserved to be taken care of by the state and the rich didn’t have to be taxed needlessly to do that (not letting us in on the secret of just where he was going to get the money from to do that); and he said that there was Despair everywhere, and he was the Hope that would drive it away (again, not telling just how he hoped to do that). In short, he said Everything without saying Anything.

It was this artful avoidance of the pitfalls of getting into the specifics of things- something which his rivals simply couldn’t resist in their desire to show that they knew it all- that made Mr. Obama’s Words so appealing to so many not just in America but around the world. The Color of his skin also helped. In electing their first Black President, America belied its earlier Image as a Hypocritical Hegemon that systematically excluded its non-White population from everyday governance while pretending to be the very Beacon of Liberty. Till the very fag end of campaigning, my father, so used to this Image, believed in all sincerity that “they would never elect a Black man as President.” But they did precisely that- and in doing so, they busted the myth that President Lincoln even after waging war on his own people for the sake of ending slavery couldn’t. And who better than a President Obama- half-black, half-white, half-Muslim, half-Christian, half-African, all-American- to send out the Message that America has Changed; or to use Mr. Obama’s own historic words, “Change Has Come to America.”

A Napoleon in America?Truth be told, after the nine angst-ridden years of Osama-phobia, America- and the world- has quite simply been swept off its feet by Obama-mania. Mr. Obama likes to compare himself with his illustrious forbearer, Abraham Lincoln. Like him, President Lincoln, who hadn’t won a single election before, was a relative non-entity amidst more celebrated personages such as Stephen Douglas; and like Mr. Obama, he owed his victory chiefly to his charismatic powers of oratory. But while his rise was most certainly unexpected, it was by no stretch of imagination heroic. (The heroism part was to come much later, when the outcome of the Civil War against the Confederacy became apparent.) It did not for instance signal the fruition of centuries of anti-racist struggle as Mr. Obama’s has done for many. Fear- and not Hope- marked President Lincoln’s first Inauguration.

In all probability, future-day historians would find more fascinating similarities between our Age and that of Napoleon after the 18th Brumaire: Bonaparte’s rise not only marked the ending of Jacobin Terreur- and momentarily, the Ancien Regime (which was to reassert itself one last time at the historic Vienna Congress of 1815)- but also ushered in an era of Hope throughout the Western World, prompting among others the composer Beethoven to compose & dedicate his majestically beautiful ‘Eroica’ symphony to ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, the Child of Revolution’.

It was only much later that the by-now completely deaf composer regretted his dedication: by then, the Child of Revolution had crowned himself Emperor, invaded much of Europe and installed his siblings as kings and queens: the Ancien Regime was back in full swing. I’m sure that President Obama would do nothing of the sort, and the comparison is totally undeserved. But then again, come to think of it, who could’ve thought that Mr. Bush would do the things he did?

After all, being all things to all people is no easy task. As Mr. Obama knows only too well, you inevitably end up disappointing someone: “One thing you can be sure of,” he told his fellow-diners at the Congress on the day of his Inauguration, “I will make mistakes.”

Let’s hope they are few and far in-between. America- and the world- can’t afford too many.

Note:The following is an excerpt from the article "Barack Obama: A Man for All Seasons". Given the latter's length, I felt that Mr. Bush at the very least deserves a separate post of his own.

Last thing I remember, I wasRunning for the doorI had to find the passage backTo the place I was before"Relax," said the night man,We are programmed to receive.You can checkout any time you like,But you can never leave!

The Eagles, Hotel California

The Bush Years were marked by a spiraling descent into war, penury and global ridicule of U.S.A. This was an era (hopefully now ending) permeated by what might be called Osama-phobia after the chief cause- the sine qua non- of President Bush’s abject but admittedly involuntary reversal from his first campaign’s now somewhat archaic big-on-morals-and-small-on-government stance. Fear, or more precisely, the fear of Fear, fed into- and authored- every decision he took. (His Vice President, the much more vilified Dick Cheney, didn’t do anything to assuage these fears.)

The two parameters of American Supremacy alluded to by Henry Kissinger in his monumental treatise on Diplomacy- military might and economic prowess- were both put to severe test by the quagmire of the Afghanistan-Iraq double-invasion; Iraq, and a widening and ultimately insurmountable Deficit- the typically American habit of spending more than they earn- that has brought about a global recession.

In the memorable words of the Eagle’s song, Iraq, in effect, became Mr. Bush’s Hotel California: You can checkout any time you like, But you can never leave! Despite his rather premature “Mission Accomplished” glee, the war in Iraq procrastinated indefinitely. From the start, the Invasion of Iraq was doomed: his justification for the invasion- that Saddam Hussein, the then Tirkiti despot of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which he hoped perhaps to use against America in league with Al Qaeda- turned out to be, to put it mildly, untrue; his method of conducting that invasion- against the express wishes of the international community- ended up alienating even America’s closest friends (with the notable exception of Britain’s Tony Blair, who inturn ended up losing his own chair); and his hope that the invasion would somehow usher in an era of democracy in the Middle East wasn’t quite realized to the extent that he had expected.

In the Case of Jefferson v Hamilton But despite all this, Mr. Bush’s worst enemy wasn’t Osama bin Laden, the Taliban or even Saddam Hussein: it was the American People themselves. No wartime American President with the possible exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has for long enjoyed his fellow-citizens’- and the Congress’- unflinching support: despite their rather militaristic national anthem, Americans have never been comfortable with the sight of body-bags of slain soldiers wrapped in star-spangled banners arriving home. At heart, they remain Jeffersonians (after Thomas Jefferson), content to be an island (albeit a rather large one!) blissfully unaware of what’s happening beyond their shores and hoping that they wouldn’t need a government to govern them at all. Let us not forget that when Mr. Bush first emerged on the scene, he too was something of a Jeffersonian in the ideals he so passionately espoused. But he too, like most Americans, was confronted with a distinctly Hamiltonian reality (after Alexander Hamilton): the almost instinctual need of the American Establishment- Noam Chomsky’s military-industrial complex- to look for new enemies when old ones are gone, as epitomized in the ironically self-fulfilling prophecy of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the New World Order. In this sense atleast, Huntington gave a fresh, new lease of life to Hamilton. And what a lease that was! President Bush, the quintessential Jeffersonian, became a die-hard disciple of Hamilton in what was to be his life’s second epiphany (the first one took him from Booze to the Bible). Of course, it would be wrong to put all the blame on the Establishmentarian Inertia of Washington: Mr. Bin Laden, in all fairness, deserves much of the credit for Mr. Bush’s conversion.

His attack on the Twin Towers (9/11) only amplified Mr. Bush’s innate sense of Christian morality: his world was suddenly divided into black & white, good & the axis of evil, and under the circumstances, Crusade was the logical outcome of Jihad. Morality breeds decisiveness; lack of it makes one indecisive. This is America’s lesson gleaned from its last two Presidents, Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton. I’ve often wondered what Mr. Clinton would’ve done had he been President on 9/11. Sure, he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, WMDs or no WMDs (remember his dilly-dallying on Kosovo, Congo and the rest); he would certainly have ruled out going it alone, without the backing of the world community (God knows, Mr. Hussein counted on that!); he might not even have considered an outright invasion of Afghanistan, toying first with Diplomacy or being content with the destruction of Mr. Bin Laden’s person. But the question that begs to be answered is this: would Al Qaeda be as thoroughly destroyed as it is now; and would 9/11 have been the last terrorist attack on American soil?

With respect to the Bush Years, I offer the following two observations: one, that it was Mr. Bush’s pandering to his Jeffersonian instincts that ultimately led to his failure in Iraq. He wanted to invade Iraq, destroy Saddam and get out as quickly as possible with a minimum of force and cost; the idea that nations don’t just build themselves after being invaded and destroyed didn’t quite cross his Jeffersonian mind (apparently he forgot all about post-second world war Western Europe and Japan, both of which required prolonged infusions of American money, manpower and foresight to rebuild themselves).

The success of the Surge in Iraq- today’s provincial elections have brought true democracy to the Middle East for the first time in history, and Mr. Bush should be given due credit for it- shows that the middle-of-the-road approach is at fault. Had Mr. Bush not been bullied by public opinion and his own mindset to limit the costs to America in the first instance, his country wouldn’t have ended up spending so much- in terms of blood, sweat, toil and money- in Iraq, and thousands of innocent lives might’ve been saved. In short, if he is to be blamed, it should be for doing too little; not too much.

Secondly, I believe it is too premature to pronounce judgment on the Bush Legacy: History will have to wait for things to settle down in Iraq before arriving at any sort of decision; hopefully, it would look more kindly upon the Bush Years than our own generation.

(To see what I mean, take a look at HBO's award-winning mini-series on John Adams, America's mostly-forgotten and much-misunderstood second President.)

Sunday, February 01, 2009

The last time we were in Kanha, the closest we came to spotting a tiger were a couple of pug-marks. This time however we got lucky when we least expected it: a Tigress very conveniently parked herself on the dirt-track, whereupon she proceeded to strike a number of rather 'sexy' poses for our viewing pleasure. This video- peppered with SNT's highly imaginative running-commentary- captures our excitement at making this totally unexpected discovery. The footage has been shot by Dr. Saibel Farishta.